Dreams from My Father

Her boyfriend was arrested last night and can’t make bail. So tell me—what can your organization do for someone like her?”
    The secretary came in with my coffee. “I was hoping you’d have some suggestions,” I said.
    “Short of tearing this whole place down and giving people a chance to start over, I’m not sure.”
    She had been a teacher for two decades, a principal for ten years. She was accustomed to skirmishes with superiors—once all-white, now mostly black—over supplies and curriculum and hiring policies. Since coming to Carver, she’d set up a child-parent center that brought teenage parents into the classroom to learn with their children. “Most of the parents here want what’s best for their child,” Dr. Collier explained. “They just don’t know how to provide it. So we counsel them on nutrition, health care, how to handle stress. We teach the ones who need it how to read so they can read to their child at home. Where we can, we help them get their high school equivalency, or hire them as teaching assistants.”
    Dr. Collier took a sip of her coffee. “What we can’t do is change the environment these girls and their babies go back to every day. Sooner or later, the child leaves us, and the parents stop coming—”
    Her phone buzzed; the painter was here.
    “I tell you what, Obama,” Dr. Collier said, rising to her feet. “You come in and talk to our parent group next week. Find out what’s on their mind. I’m not encouraging you, now. But if the parents decide they want to raise some hell with you, I can’t stop them, can I?”
    She laughed cheerfully and walked me into the hallway, where a wobbly line of five- and six-year-olds was preparing to enter a classroom. A few of them waved and smiled at us; a pair of boys toward the rear spun around and around, their arms tight against their sides; a tiny little girl struggled to yank a sweater over her head and got tangled up in the sleeves. As the teacher tried to direct them up the stairs, I thought how happy and trusting they all seemed, that despite the rocky arrivals many of them had gone through—delivered prematurely, perhaps, or delivered into addiction, most of them already smudged with the ragged air of poverty—the joy they seemed to find in simple locomotion, the curiosity they displayed toward every new face, seemed the equal of children anywhere. They made me think back to those words of Regina’s, spoken years ago, in a different time and place:
It’s not about you.
    “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dr. Collier said.
    “They really are.”
    “The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.”
    “What change is that?”
    “When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.”
             
    I began spending several hours a week with those children and their parents. The mothers were all in their late teens or early twenties; most had spent their lives in Altgeld, raised by teenage mothers themselves. They spoke without self-consciousness about pregnancy at fourteen or fifteen, the dropping out of school, the tenuous links to the fathers who slipped in and out of their lives. They told me about working the system, which involved mostly waiting: waiting to see the social worker, waiting at the currency exchange to cash their welfare checks, waiting for the bus that would take them to the nearest supermarket, five miles away, just to buy diapers on sale.
    They had mastered the tools of survival in their tightly bound world and made no apologies for it. They weren’t cynical, though; that surprised me. They still had ambitions. There were girls like Linda and Bernadette Lowry, two sisters Dr. Collier had helped get high school equivalencies. Bernadette was now taking classes at the community college; Linda, pregnant again, stayed at home to look after Bernadette’s son, Tyrone, and her own daughter, Jewel—but she said she’d be going to college, too, once her new baby was born. After that they would both find jobs, they said—in food management, maybe, or as secretaries. Then they would move out of Altgeld. In Linda’s apartment one day, they showed me an album they kept full of clippings from
Better Homes and Gardens
. They pointed to the bright white kitchens and hardwood floors, and told me they would have such a home one day. Tyrone would take